Love is tyrant

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.” - Neil Gaiman

Love is terrible. I believe it is a juggernaut, hell bent on demolishing who you are. Love cannot create before it destroys. Love demands sacrifice. It needs blood. Your blood. Your old self must die at the altar of love. You cannot be you and be in love, truly and deeply. Your old self needs to perish and give rise to newer one. Love is humiliating. It wants your submission, your sense of self. It is a force that once you reckon with, will humble you. There is no sense of control but only surrender.

Consider the state of motherhood. You physically and mentally undergo a change. Painful change. The same goes for fathers and although the change is less obvious, it does occur. Parents change a lot for their kids. Most of them also love their offspring very much. The easy thing about it is that Mother Nature designed us for it. We have the blood connection to fall back on when the going gets tough.

However, when it comes to love between two individuals not related by blood, things get complicated. The old self refuses to die. The ego doesn't want to budge. Your sense of superiority or pride, take your pick, raises its ugly head. Change is hard, we already know that. Changing for love is even harder. Biology compels us to change for our offspring but Psychology meddles a bit too much when it comes to changing for your love. What if it doesn't work out? What if I have to change more than the other person?  Why should I give up being me? Isn't that unfair? But then, aren't you giving up me to be a, better “we”? If the very notion is revolting to you then what business is it of yours to even be in love? 

"To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose, the next best." - William Thackeray

It all boils down to the flexibility of your emotional self. How quickly can the two of adapt to each other to create a unified entity. I know it sounds so tacky. Haven't we heard this before? They became one in love. They are two bodies but one soul. Blah-blah-blah yada-yada-yada! You can only learn through your own experiences. No one can make you believe this.

What does religion says about love? Hindu philosophy states that becoming one with God involves letting go of your meagre, tiny, inconsequential existence, dissolving your ego and embracing the supreme consciousness. Can you imagine how difficult it must be? Can you imagine denying the perceivable reality of your flesh, bones, ego and self to acknowledge a greater and apparently invisible reality? How do even get there? I believe that is why we need to learn how to be in love. How else will you learn how to be one with the supreme if you can't be one with women and men?

Love is such a fucking tyrant! It has no sense of fairness or justice. It wants what it wants, and you are not getting anywhere without giving in to it. Damn all the sweet, sappy, cuddle filled notions of love! Love is beautiful. It gives meaning to life and a sense of purpose. But it definitely isn’t easy.

"Can there be a love which does not make demands on its object?" - Confucius

Love, Marriage, Philosophy and Physics

You won't believe it that I wrote this. Me, who worships the Gods of Bachelorhod every day . The guy who cannot bear to be addressed by honeyed words of the “honey,sweetie,cutie,babe” kind. Yes . I did write this . Stuff about love and marriage. At the cost of being banned for life from ze Cool Boys Club, I did write this.

A nocturnal conversation between the man who is my father, my teacher and my best friend, and yours truly , imbibed me with the following facts, mythological facts if you want it that way. And I digested them, and came up with this .

Ram is known as Marayada Purushottam Ram, the ideal man . Ideal man , he WAS , but the ideal husband he wasn't . He failed to perform his “patni-dharma” , and their marriage was tested and failed . It is as simple as that . There is nothing blasphemous about it . No Sir . No religious sentiments can be hurt by this one . This is the way it happened . And the conclusion is , that ideal man he was, he could not be the ideal husband. He loved her, but the affairs of his kingdom caught with him, and ruined his marriage.

The day , and I don't what day is it or what is it called , on which Ram and Sita were married is considered to be the unholiest day for marriage . Now don't go on shredding this logic by asking for scientific facts supporting this argument . Just look at it, as abstractly as possible , by believing in what happened rather than how did it happen , and you will see .

And the day the Destroyer married the Source of All Energy, the day Shiva married Parvati , is considered to be the holiest and the most auspicious day to marry. Mondays, as a day to fast, are very popular young single women seekking a kickass husband, because it is the day of the King of the Dancers, Mahesh . And why, because he WAS the ideal husband. He did not fail his wife, unlike Ram . Bhole Baba is a true Rockstar .

And don't look at this story as one from Hinduism. Abstraction again, look at what happened, and not where it happened. It just makes a lot of sense to me, in a very different way. They explain to me, the notion of marriage and the concept of love.

An ideal man can never be the ideal husband, and the ideal husband can never be the ideal man . It is like the concept of duality , they both co-exist and mutually .

Sometimes, and I don't know why, Hindu Mythology seems like Physics to me, told like a story or as a poem. I see Creation, Destruction, Preservation, Energy, Mater, Antimatter, Quantum Mechanics and what not. I can't really find out all the physics in it, but I can get the hang of some of it , some of the times .


p.s. Thou shall not blame the author if you were quietly scratching your head , or hurling abuses at me , after reading this . :)